Thread: People that steal

I haven't had anything big stolen but talking with a concrete crew here today. There on a big job. 2 24ft trailers with screeds, wheel barrels, hand tools etc and 1 20 ft enclosed trailer with the expensive tools in. Power trowls, ride on trowls etc. came to job site Monday morning only to have the day off....all equipment was gone. They had a lift and skid in front of two trailers and the other trailer parked behind it. Appearently they hot wire the lift and moved everything and took off. That would not be cool!

In 2007 my 2004 Bobcat mini excavator went missing off a job in broad daylight. Before lunch is was there and after it was gone - never to be seen again. Then in 2009 my 2005 590 Super M TLB went for a middle of the night drive off of a jobsite on the south side of Lexington and headed down US 27. Thanks to GPS tracking, it was recovered in Stanford, KY the next day. In 2011, not far from where my TLB was stolen, my 2008 D8 went on a late night doze and was tracked to Irvine,KY. It too, was recovered, undamaged the next day. While heavy equipment theft has slowed a little around here, all of my big stuff is GPS equipped. With smaller tools it nearly impossible to have enough layers of protection. And stuff like copper wire....unless it's energized in a locked building, you may as well take it directly from the supply house to the scrap yard. How times have changed in the last 20 years.

Theft has been pretty bad in my area the last couple years. I heard a lot of stories of backpacks being taken off racks on trailers parked in front of accounts while guys where mowing. I was unlucky enough to have an $800 chainsaw snagged off my tailgate while I was within 20 feet. I have no idea how it happened but I was chunking up some large logs to be loaded into my dumptruck with my excavator set the saw down for a minute before realizing I hadn't cut one all the way through. I hopped off my excavator and as I approached the truck I realized the saw was gone. I looked everywhere. I had two guys working with me neither of them saw anything, neither did I. Must've had someone watching us the whole time we were working.